News

It took until Day 4 for Canadian federal agents to get to the biggest question. By then, Omar Khadr had collected himself. The 16-year-old was serious and deliberate, his arms draped across the back of a small blue sofa, trying his best to look confident.

The agents interviewing the teenaged terror suspect at Guantanamo Bay wanted to know about the death of U.S. Sergeant First-Class Christopher Speer, a Special Forces soldier killed in action while he and his troops raided an insurgent compound in Afghanistan. "How did that American end up getting so dead then? … You were there. You participated in this action," a Canadian interrogator said.

"What could I do?" Mr. Khadr replied. "What other choice did I have?"

U.S. cameras taped more than seven hours of video footage of the Canadian agents' visit to Guantanamo Bay. The once-secret material was widely released Tuesday after a series of Canadian court orders.

The most widely circulated footage showed Mr. Khadr breaking down in a room by himself, repeatedly saying something that sounded like "kill me, or ya ummi [Oh Mom]," after ripping off his orange jumpsuit.

However, The Globe and Mail has reviewed all seven hours of the tapes, shot in February, 2003, including gripping moments from the last day, when pretenses and soft questions were dispensed with, as the interview abruptly ended in mutual frustration.

"Let's just be honest with each other this one time," said a Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent who can't be identified for national security reasons. He urged Mr. Khadr to reveal his role in the deadly battle in Afghanistan, saying the teenager should have run away from the fight.

But Mr. Khadr said that at age 15, he was "too young" to quit the fundamentalist fighters to whom his father — an al-Qaeda suspect — had entrusted him.

That prompted an angry retort from the CSIS agent. "You're not too young; you're a man," he said.

He added: "Your dad dropped you off there for a reason … you think it's fine what you did."

"I didn't do anything," Mr. Khadr replied. "What did I do? I was in a house."

The impasse ended the talks, with the CSIS agent angrily rejecting the teenager's allegations of U.S. torture. He called Mr. Khadr "a robot," giving a "rehearsed speech."

Before that, Mr. Khadr and the agent had hit many conversational impasses, amid both friendly banter and Mr. Khadr's sobbing sessions, as CSIS tried to establish the travels of the teenager's notorious family throughout the Middle East, Asia and Canada during the 1990s and before 9/11. To smooth the conversation along, the agents brought him Big Macs, Subway sandwiches and small bottles of Coke.

Gestures of friendship started the discussion. "I guess we're the first Canadians you've seen in a while," said the CSIS agent, in the first minutes of the interview.

"Finally," Mr. Khadr replied, his face lighting up, as his visitors took off his handcuffs and gave him food. "I've been requesting the Canadian government for a long time."

The CSIS agents — three were in Guantanamo Bay, but just one agent took the lead — were travelling with a Foreign Affairs intelligence official, Jim Gould. At first, the Canadians presented themselves as the teenager's new best friends. "Are you hungry? Have you eaten?" they asked. "You want some Subway?" "Do you want a Coke, Omar?"

On the first day, Mr. Khadr made many admissions, though the audio of many significant passages has been edited out for national security reasons. But as the agents struggled to fine-tune their understanding of the Khadr family's twisting narrative, they kept returning to some common places and personalities.

• Osama bin Laden: Mr. Khadr told CSIS the al-Qaeda leader was an old friend of his father, that the Khadr family hopped across countries to be with him in Afghanistan during Islamic holidays. CSIS asked Mr. Khadr whether his father embraced "UBL" during the meetings, whether the senior Mr. Khadr embraced him and kissed him on the cheeks during some meetings. The teenager said his father did not.
• Family finances: The CSIS agents wanted to know how the Khadrs managed to travel between Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Yemen, Syria and Canada during the late 1990s, with no apparent means of support other than their work for Islamic charities. Mr. Khadr replied his father lived off a Canadian disability pension. A lengthy censored passage follows a CSIS question about Mr. Khadr's mother's relationship with a member of the Bahrain's royal family. The CSIS agents also asked about the time his older brothers spent in the Khalden training camp.
• Zaynab's wedding: CSIS had a lot of questions about Omar Khadr's big sister, Zaynab Khadr, and her boyfriends. Omar Khadr said she had been twice married off by her father to al-Qaeda suspects. The detainee also told CSIS that Osama bin Laden attended one of Zaynab's weddings, but he couldn't remember if al-Qaeda's No. 2 and No. 3 leaders were in attendance.

On the second day of the interviews, Mr. Khadr ceased talking entirely, as the Canadian federal agents wondered aloud just who their compliant prisoner had been replaced with. The video camera caught Mr. Khadr's face looking ashen, as he said he felt that no one on Earth cared about him. Left alone to compose himself, a camera caught him weeping for more than 10 minutes.

It was this footage that Mr. Khadr's lawyers circulated, after winning disclosure of the tapes through a series of court battles, on an eight-minute "highlight reel" yesterday. The video garnered international headlines on just about every major English-language media company, but there was no reaction from the Canadian government, which has said it will continue to defer to the ongoing U.S. prosecution of Mr. Khadr for war crimes.

When Mr. Khadr breaks down on tape, a Canadian agent is heard telling him that the solution to his pain is talking. "We can't protect you if we don't know what it is you have to say," he said. The CSIS agent added that if the detainee truly cared about his family he would talk, so that "other members of your family … don't end up as the same situation you are in."

By the third and fourth days, the conversations restarted, though Mr. Khadr was far less helpful than he had been on Day 1.

That left the Canadian agents complaining that Mr. Khadr had put up a "defensive shell" that was wasting their time. "Thank you very much for your time and we got other things to do," the lead agent said, as he started to walk away.

"You just want to hear what you want to hear," Mr. Khadr said. A few minutes later, he added: "I don't know what you think I am. You ask me questions like I'm somebody in al-Qaeda or whatever."

The CSIS agent replied, "I never asked if you were in al-Qaeda."

He said he bore no hard feelings. "Anyway Omar, thank you very much for your time."

The last shots, taken after the Canadian agents left the room, show Omar Khadr putting his head into his hands and weeping.

That was 51/2 years ago. Mr. Khadr remains in Guantanamo today, now 21, charged in the murder of SFC Speer in Afghanistan.

With a report from Omar El Akkad in Ottawa